2021Q3 Reports: Tutorial Chairs

The tutorial selection process (call for proposals, submission, reviewing, and final selection) was carried out jointly by the tutorial chairs for ACL-IJNCLP, NAACL, EACL, and EMNLP:

EACL: Isabelle Augenstein and Ivan Habernal ACL-IJCNLP: David Chiang and Min Zhang EMNLP: Jing Jiang and Ivan Vulic NAACL: Dan Gillick and Greg Kondrak

Special thanks goes to Ivan Habernal, who did much of the coordination work. Xiangyu Duan (Soochow University) assisted with the ACL-IJCNLP tutorial proceedings.

The call for proposals was substantially the same as the call in 2020. It invited proposals for both “cutting-edge” and “introductory” tutorials and encouraged submission from various under-represented groups in computational linguistics (e.g., gender, ethnicity, nationality).

There were 35 submissions, which were reviewed by the joint tutorial chairs. Each proposal received two reviews and was evaluated according to its clarity and preparedness, novelty or timely character of the topic, instructors’ experience, likely audience interest, open access of the teaching material, and diversity aspects. Across all four conferences, 23 proposals were accepted, of which six were selected for ACL-IJCNLP:

T1: Advances in Debating Technologies: Building AI That Can Debate Humans T2: Event-Centric Natural Language Understanding T3: Meta Learning and Its Applications to Natural Language Processing T4: Pre-training Methods for Neural Machine Translation T5: Prosody: Models, Methods, and Applications T6: Recognizing Multimodal Entailment

Three tutorials opted to present their tutorial live (over Zoom) and three opted to pre-record their tutorials and hold live Q&A sessions. Tutorials were scheduled in one of two four-hour slots, 11pm-3am or 1-5pm (UTC), which correspond roughly to (early) morning and (late) evening in East Asia.